Ranked: The World’s Most Innovative Countries in 2024

This article is published in collaboration with Visual Capitalist

Ranked: The World’s Most Innovative Countries in 2024

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The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2024, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), ranks 133 economies based on their innovation capabilities and performance. This year’s report highlights shifts in global innovation leadership, with a focus on emerging economies challenging traditional leaders.

To summarize the results of this year’s GII, we visualized each economy’s score using a global heatmap. Lower scores are shown as darker shades of blue, transitioning to green and then yellow as score increases.

Methodology

The GII measures each economy based on seven underlying innovation pillars, which altogether comprise 78 indicators. These are summarized in the table below:

The overall GII scores (which are what we’ve shown in the graphic above) are based on the average scores from these seven pillars.

Most Innovative Countries in 2024

The following table includes all of the data we used to create this graphic. For the 14th consecutive year, Switzerland was named the world’s most innovative country.

Similar to last year, the U.S. takes third place in the GII. It ranked the highest in Market Sophistication (#1) and Business Sophistication (#2), but its overall score was dragged down by its lower rank in Infrastructure (#30).

A key theme of this year’s GII is innovation overperformers, which are countries that perform above expectation relative to their level of development.

The top three in this regard are India, Moldova, and Vietnam. All three of these economies have overperformed over the past 14 years since 2011.

Other Key Takeaways

The GII 2024 also provides insight into the current state of global innovation. Here are some of the highlights:

Technological progress: The rate of progress in green technologies is lagging behind average growth for the decade. A key challenge here is reducing the energy consumption of supercomputers.
Technology adoption: 5G, robotics, and electric vehicles are all seeing increased penetration levels.
Socioeconomic impact: The GII reports mixed progress, partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, levels of poverty are higher than those recorded in 2018, while life expectancy remains at 2015 levels.